On New Year’s Day 1999, on the eve of the new Millennium, jockey Martin Stukely is crushed beneath a fallen horse at Cheltenham racecourse (perhaps the most dangerous racing venue in England), casting a terrible shadow over his friend’s celebrations of the new year.
One of them is his best friend, Gerard Logan, a glassblower with a small studio and a taste for horse racing.
A burglar breaks in while Gerard and a mutual friend are celebrating and steals a videotape that Martin passed to Gerard.
Worse follows – Martin’s house is broken into, and every videotape that he has is stolen. Soon afterwards, Gerard is ambushed on his way home by four masked attackers armed with baseball bats. They don’t believe that he doesn’t have the tape that Martin gave him, nor do they much care. When he hears the woman urging the others to “break his wrists,” the same wrists that Logan relies upon for his glass-blowing, he knows that even if he survives, he may never be able to work with his beloved glass again.
It emerges that two sets of villains are after two different tapes – and he no longer has either of them.
Logan is accustomed to the terrible dangers that come with working molten glass around a furnace at temperatures above 1000 degrees centigrade (1800 degrees Fahrenheit). But he isn’t used to being hounded by a psychotic woman who hates him purely because he is a man who isn’t afraid of her. Or a fraudulent researcher who wanders around with killing drugs in a syringe. They’ll torture, maim and finally kill him anyway. Logan realizes that is only hope of staying alive is to find the tape himself.
Fortunately, Gerard has friends. Tom Pigeon has a reputation for violence and three dobermans that will rip apart anyone their owner tells them to; fortunately, Gerard tried to save his father’s life, and Tom feels he owes him. There’s Marigold, Martin’s mother-in-law, and her valet-cum-bodyguard, Worthington. There’s the fifteen-year-old schoolboy, who really, really doesn’t want to live with his mum and aunt. And Gerard’s three members of staff. Even if one of them is a spy.
Above all, there’s the motorcycling PC Catherine Dodds, with whom Gerard slowly finds love.
Gerard is an appealing and engaging hero, and Catherine an unconventional heroine. Shattered is a much more contemporary-feeling novel than Francis’ reputation would lead the casual reader to expect.
